Snow in August (31 page)

Then it was the day after their wedding. As Rabbi Hirsch spoke, Michael could see him at the door, as Leah said goodbye. She
had to go to Lublin in Poland for five days of urgent meetings, and now she was asking Rabbi Hirsch to make a brief trip to
Austria to deliver a package. They would meet again in Prague and then leave together for the south. To make their way to
Palestine.

He saw Rabbi Hirsch arguing with her. This is foolish, he was saying. The Nazis are in power in Vienna. And Hitler is moving
troops on the Czech borders. Open your nose, he was saying to Leah. You can smell death. And in such a time, he tells her,
I want to be with my wife.

But Leah insisted. Rabbi Hirsch would go by car through the mountains to a certain hamlet. He would be met at a certain place
by a certain man, would turn over a thick envelope, and then retrace his steps, back to Prague.

“I say, ‘Leah, even a donkey takes one look at me and knows I am a rabbi.’ She says, ‘Not if your beard you shave off. Not
if your clothes you change. Please,’ she says to me, ‘on this envelope, the money inside, depends hundreds of lives.’”

He paused. Michael leaned forward, his head full of James Cagney in
13 Rue Madeleine
.

“What did you do?” he asked.

“My beard I shaved,” he said. “My clothes I changed.” He paused. “We say goodbye. A joke she makes that with my shaved face
and clothes from the university, she feels she’s kissing another man. I kiss her again and say when we are safe, I never shave
again.”

And then Michael joined the beardless Rabbi Hirsch in a car driven by a blond Jew who spoke German. Racing through backroads,
climbing into mountains, plunging into forests, until at last they reached a hunter’s cabin. Two members of the underground
were waiting, holding machine guns. Rabbi Hirsch turned over the package of money. The driver went on alone, to Vienna, and
when he was gone, Rabbi Hirsch learned Hitler had marched into Czechoslovakia. Not a shot had been fired. The Wehrmacht was
in Prague. The Nazis were securing the borders, including the border with Poland. And Leah Yaretzky was across that border,
in Poland.

Now Michael could see Rabbi Hirsch turn and walk straight into the forest. Saw him as he walked and walked, avoiding the main
roads, sleeping under bridges and in train stations and even in a chair in a public library. He walked with Rabbi Hirsch as
they crossed together into Czechoslovakia and then saw thousands of German troops moving in trucks on main roads. Billowing
in the wind were those scary black-and-red flags adorned with swastikas.

Then at last, Rabbi Hirsch was in Prague. He called the apartment across the street from the synagogue, the small flat where
he was to live with Leah Yaretzky. Nobody answered. He saw men in black Gestapo uniforms driving around in polished black
cars. An old man told him that some Jews had already been arrested, their names on Gestapo lists. He went to the post office,
which was guarded by men in SS uniforms, but was told that nobody could place calls to Poland. From a café
on Wenceslas Square, he called some other members of Leah’s network. Nobody answered the first three calls and a German voice
answered the fourth. The network had vanished, and so had Leah.

He finally risked going to the apartment. There were no Germans to be seen. A sign on the door of the synagogue across the
street said that it was closed, but there were no guards posted on the steps. In the apartment, he packed a small canvas bag
with pictures of Leah and his father, along with clothes and his basic documents. He burned the Zionist literature. Then he
made two final packages of books, carried them to the synagogue, entered through a side door, and placed them in a storeroom
in the basement. He rolled the Torah scroll and took it to the home of Mr. Fishbach, the beadle, who left immediately for
the mountains, where the scroll would be hidden from the Germans.

“I wanted to go, right away to leave,” he said, as Michael imagined his movements through Prague. “But Leah, she was out there,
someplace. I knew this, I believed this, I hoped this.”

Before leaving, Mr. Fishbach had told him there would be a final meeting at the Old-New Synagogue at four in the morning.
The doors were locked, but there was a tunnel in the basement of a house down the street. Then Michael was moving through
the fog with Rabbi Hirsch, dodging Nazis, avoiding streetlamps, wary of informers, plunging into the ghetto, along the streets
he knew so well. They went into the modern apartment house that had been erected on the site of the old Fiinfter Palast. Then
into the basement, where a man was waiting, showing him the hidden door, and then through tunnels, dripping and dank, and
into the Old-New Synagogue. Rabbis were praying. Young rabbis were making
disguises. Old rabbis stared at the walls. The leaders began making frantic arrangements to smuggle out the most holy artifacts
from the Old-New Synagogue, to hide them in the mountains, or somehow move them to Palestine. Michael thought about the attic,
the sealed room, the two tiny coffins, the silver spoon.

And then a young man from the underground appeared, explained what they all must do to escape, and at the end, called Rabbi
Hirsch to the side.

“He tells me at the Polish border, Leah has been arrested. Leah and two others. By the Gestapo. They find two guns and Zionist
writings.”

He was quiet for a long moment. As if imagining what had been done to his wife.

“I never see her again,” he said.

Kate Devlin reached out and touched his shoulder, to steady him. Then she quickly withdrew her hand, as if the rabbi might
think her gesture inappropriate.

“Later, we heared that she died in a camp.”

“Good God,” she said.

“No, Mrs. Devlin. God was not good.”

Michael thought: He doubts God. Here it is again. He’s a rabbi and he doubts the goodness of God. Michael realized that he
had been holding a piece of pound cake in his hand for a long time. He eased it toward his mouth. Thinking: how can he still
be a rabbi if he doubts God?

“And you, Rabbi Hirsch?” Kate Devlin said. “How did
you
get away?”

“Very simple,” he said, without pride. “I ran.” Then he shrugged. “Or better, I walked. I walked to the mountains and traded
my clothes with a woodcutter. I shave the hair off my head, so that now I am bald and without a beard.”
He turned to Michael. “Like Brother Thaddeus.” A small smile. “Everything black, I throwed away. My identity papers I burned.
My father’s picture, this too. Anybody looking at him, he’s a Jew. All I have is in my little bag, a picture of Leah, a few
shirts, a toothbrush. I walked and hid, like an animal that is lost.”

He walked through Romania. He walked through Yugoslavia. He walked all the way to Greece. In Piraeus, he eventually boarded
a ship going to the Dominican Republic, where a dictator named Trujillo was accepting Jews, because he thought there were
too many black people in his country. Rabbi Hirsch lived in the Jewish colony the Dominicans called Sosua. He was one of the
rabbis. The sun was hot. The beaches were white. He stayed for the duration of the war.

“And that’s it, the story of my life,” Rabbi Hirsch said. He smiled in a tentative way and sipped his wine. “Or like they
say in Sosua,
la historia de mi vida
. Some Spanish I learned there too. I built some houses. I fished in the sea. I read all the time, newspapers in Spanish and
English,
Time
magazine. My books, most of them were sent from Palestine, and so I have them there too, have Prague in the books.” He tapped
his forehead. “And here too.”

He ran his tongue over his lips as if cleaning the residue of the wine.

“The colony in Sosua? A failure. City people, we are not good farmers. When the war ends, most of the Jews leave. I stay a
little longer, but last year I camed here, when from Brooklyn the synagogue put a notice in the paper for a rabbi.” He shook
his head slowly. “How do you say? That’s all there is to it. The ball game is over.
Nada más
.”

Michael glanced at the clock over the stove. Almost midnight.
He was exhausted, but he wanted the night of confession and disclosure to go on and on.

“Are you absolutely certain, Rabbi, that your wife is dead?” Kate Devlin said calmly.

The rabbi was slumping now, his face drawn.

“One guy, I met him in Ellis Island, right out there,” he said, motioning with his wine glass to the window and the distant
harbor. “He tells me he is in the underground with Leah. And he says she shot three Nazis when they try to arrest her, and
so they don’t kill her. Killing her is like mercy. They keep her alive, in the Gestapo building. And when they are finish
with her, they send her to the camps. Maybe Treblinka. Maybe Auschwitz. Nobody knows.”

“But there must be some records,” Kate said.

“After the war, letters I wrote to the Americans, the British, even the Russians,” he said. “In German I wrote, in Czech,
in my not good English.” His body slumped lower in the chair. “To nobody I wrote in Yiddish. Nobody is left alive to read
it.” He took a deep breath, then let it go. “To Prague I wrote, to Vienna, to Warsaw, to the Jewish agencies in Tel Aviv.
Everywhere, I wrote. All have her name on the same lists, just one name with millions of others. Dead, they say. No details.
Just one word.
Dead
. In different languages. Same meaning.”

The rabbi looked at Michael’s face and touched his blackened skin and shook his head. Kate got up and went into the bathroom,
closing the door behind her. Michael stared at the older man.

“Rabbi?” he whispered.

“Yes?”

“When you went to the meeting in the Old-New Synagogue?”

“Yes?”

“Why didn’t you make the Golem?”

The rabbi turned his head and gazed out the open window at the nighttime city and the distant skyline of Manhattan.

“This I think about all the time,” he said softly. “Maybe…”

He didn’t finish the sentence because Kate returned from the bathroom and sat down facing him. Her eyes were swollen and pink.
The pint bottle of wine was almost empty. She shared the last inch with Rabbi Hirsch.

“Your wife was a hero, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said in a consoling way. Michael noticed a slight crack in her voice, a tremble.

“Yes. You said it. A hero.”

“And if you ask me, you are too,” she said.

“No.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Leah, yes. Your husband, yes. But me? A hero?
Neyn. Keyn mol
. No.”

She sipped the wine, her eyes full of concern and doubt, but in some way holding back. It was as if one question had been
rising to her tongue across the long evening and she couldn’t let Rabbi Hirsch leave without asking it. Michael watched her,
waiting for her to speak.

“Do you still believe in God, Rabbi?” she said at last.

His face looked drained and pale. He shook his head from side to side.

“I believe in sin,” he said, and finished his wine. “I believe in evil.”

A
t the door, before setting out on his return journey through the parish, Rabbi Hirsch suddenly stopped and searched through
his pockets. “
Vart a minut
… wait a minute. Ah, here!” He waved a small envelope, smiled, then removed two tickets. To Ebbets Field.

“For us,” he said. “To see Jackie!” The rabbi’s face brightened as he remembered a song from the radio. “We will buy peanuts
and Cracker Jacks, and I don’t care if we ever get back!”

Michael could only mumble his thanks, unable to speak up. The rabbi had told him that he’d never seen a baseball game, not
even in the Dominican Republic. But Michael had never been to a professional game either; most kids in the parish saw their
first game with their father. The boy had played ball. He had watched sandlot games at the Parade Grounds, on the far end
of Prospect Park. But the great ballplayers of the Dodgers lived in newsreels, on the radio, on the other side of the gates
of Ebbets Field. He had thought he would finally see the Dodgers with Sonny and Jimmy, once school was over. But things had
gone wrong. He might never even see Sonny and Jimmy again. Now here comes Rabbi Hirsch. This wonderful man. With tickets to
Ebbets Field. Together we’ll see the Dodgers. And Jackie Robinson. Oh, jeez. He turned his head, afraid the rabbi would see
the tears in his eyes.

“What a grand thing to do, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said, smiling in a beautiful way. Michael wondered if the rabbi saw her as
beautiful too. She examined the date on the tickets and gave them back to the rabbi. Two weeks away. “But you know, he’ll
still have the cast on his leg.”

“We’ll get there, Mom,” Michael insisted. “Don’t worry.”

Then he asked Rabbi Hirsch for one final favor: to sign his cast. The rabbi smiled and wrote on the smooth, hard plaster in
chiseled Hebrew lettering. Michael thought: No ironworker has
that
on his cast. And they said good night.

“Please, Rabbi,” Kate Devlin said, “be careful.”

“Thank you.”

“Mom, he got away from the
Gestapo
. He should be able to get away from the Falcons.”

The rabbi smiled in a tired, knowing way and was gone.

“He’s a good man,” Kate said, as she locked the door behind him. “And very sad.”

In the morning, Michael began his own version of spring training. He went to the roof and packed two Campbell’s Soup cans
with pebbles and taped the ends and started doing curls to build up his arms. He lay on his back and pedaled his legs in the
air. The cast on his lower right leg was very heavy; he could only pedal it six times at first. Then eight. Then ten. After
a few days, the weight of the cast lessened; he then tied the packed soup cans to his good left leg, to even out the
weight. His foot sweated heavily inside the cast, and he had to scratch himself with a school ruler or a butter knife. But
he was getting stronger. He could feel it.

Each day when his mother left for work, he laid out his schoolbooks on the table and studied, made notes, drilled himself
in math and catechism and history. The radio played all day long, but he was able to concentrate on the schoolwork. He would
take the exams soon; he wanted to do better than he’d ever done in the past. To hit singles and doubles. To race home, like
Jackie Robinson. He even reviewed all the goddamned rules of English grammar and stopped himself when his mind wandered into
the more adventurous terrain of Yiddish. In some weird way, trying to learn Yiddish made him understand English better. Grammar
was like the frame of a building, he thought, the structure, what you had to build before you put in the floors or the walls
or the roof. Maybe it was boring, but it was necessary. It was like playing baseball. The sportswriters kept talking about
how Robinson knew the fundamentals. The basics. The rules. They really meant he’d learned how to play baseball the right way.
Not like it was a goddamned hobby. For Robinson, baseball wasn’t stamp collecting or model airplanes or something. It was
his life.